Jake Whiddon joins me to talk about what should go in a language learning app. Do language learning apps reflect educational theory? What are apps doing better than teachers? And what tricks are app designers missing?
Ross Thorburn: Welcome back to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast" everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. In this week's episode, we're looking at "What should be in a language learning app?"
I think as apps are becoming more and more common, it's going to be more and more important that teachers can give students and parents informed advice about what app to choose to learn a language.
In this week's episode, we have Jake Whiddon sharing insights from his research, which he's recently conducted as part of his master's program at the Norwich Institute of Language Education into apps and app‑based language learning. Now, on with the episode.
Ross: Jake, to begin with, what made you want to investigate apps for language learning?
Jake Whiddon: I currently work for an app company.
Ross: [laughs] That's a good reason.
Jake: That was the main reason. I also was interested in it because 2020 saw the rise of not just online teaching but a massive rise in the number of students and children having to use apps to continue learning while the schools were close. That's probably the other main reason why I was so focused on it.
Ross: I also get impressions not a huge amount of research already out there on what works in apps.
Jake: Up until 2015, no. By 2015, there were 80,000 educational apps in the App Store with practically none of them have had researched done on them.
Ross: Which is so interesting because I think in most countries, if you wanted to start a school, you probably need to go through a lot of government red tape to get that open. Interestingly, if you open an app and put it online, I guess no one really has to check that.
Jake: No, you just click a checkbox that says, "This is an education lab."
Ross: I presume another challenge with making an effective app is that maybe a lot of the time that people building the apps...I guess there's probably not many, many people who could do that, right?
You'd either be a teacher, and you might understand the learning, but you wouldn't know much about the tech. [laughs] If you've got the tech skills, you probably wouldn't necessarily know much about that educational theory.
Jake: That's exactly right. There's a lot of app companies I've been looking at that are just people from the tech industry who've realized the education and edtech is going to be a big business. They have tried to do that, and they lack those things.
Interestingly, [laughs] you see a lot of apps developed by educational PhDs, but they're not user‑friendly. They don't have that engagement. They don't have that gamey feeling about them. They lack there as well.
You can imagine if you're a child, and you've been playing Minecraft all day, and then suddenly someone says, "Do use this app," and it's developed by an educator, they don't necessarily end up being as fun.
Ross: You're already now getting into this. What are some of the things that should be in an educational or language learning's app?
Jake: That's funny you ask that, Ross.
Ross: [laughs]
Jake: I've just recently done some research. A lot of it comes back to one paper called "Putting the Education into 'Educational' Apps" by Kathy Hirsh‑Pasek, written in 2015. She highlights four things.
These are mixed‑up amongst the science of learning. She pulls them and calls them the four pillars of the science of learning. She talks about active learning. What she coins as minds on learning.
This is that you need to have some challenge to the learner and what Vygotsky would have called the zone of proximal development. There has to be a challenge that pushes the child or the learner to something plus above what they're learning at. That's one of them.
Ross: Do you want to give us an example of what that would look like in a sea of vocabulary...
[crosstalk]
Jake: A classic one would be pop the colored bubbles. Firstly, red would come up. Boo, pop. [laughs] It would be red and blue. The app might say, "Pop red," so then the child's firstly just seeing red. The second time, they have to choose between red and blue. It might go pop. Then green, red, and blue might pop up. It would say, "Pop green." They've got a differentiated green is not that.
That's one way that it keeps getting a little bit harder and a little bit harder. Within apps, what you'll see is that they're getting faster and faster as well. Not only the language is getting more difficult, but the speed in which they do, it is getting more difficult.
You can increase the difficulty of speed, or the difficulty of the language, or the difficulty of the task which is another way of doing it. All three of those things are active learning.
Ross: What's really interesting about that, I think, is it's also true for any teacher who's playing classroom‑based games as well. Those are also ways that you can make those games more challenging, is adding in more vocabulary, for example, for a flashcard game, or getting students to do it faster, or getting the students to use more language when they're doing them.
There's all these different ways of increasing challenge. I guess yet, they're similar for both app‑based learning and classroom‑based learning.
Jake: That's number one, active learning. Number two is engagement in learning. Engagement is often referred to as attention or focus. What is the app doing to keep the child on task? Engagement doesn't just mean, "How fun is it?" That's one of the tools used to keep the child on task.
Some of the other tools might be, "What extrinsic motivators are they using?" Is it giving points? Is it making fun sounds? Is he giving you little gems to collect? Here's a very important point to mention here though. It's about reducing the number of distractions.
You'll notice in some apps, lots and lots of things happening. What they find is that's not very good for learning because you're getting too distracted. A good app, it will be quite simple actually and have a lot less things going on, keeping them in on a task, giving them little bits of "Good job" and "Well done" but reducing the number of distractions.
Ross: It's interesting, because I remember when you worked at a course book publisher, talking about something very similar with, how a lot of modern course books are designed now where there's maybe not much of a background, and this is characters talking to each other on a white page...
Jake: More whitespace, right? The whitespace is in because you wanted to focus the child in online learning. That's all about attention. We had active, we had engagement, and the next one is meaningful learning that the content has to be meaningful to the learner. There's two things that the language is in context. Some apps don't put the language in context at all.
Ross: They're just learning decontextualized, vocabulary items, flashcards without any background?
Jake: Yeah, and it doesn't really give a purpose to learning there but actually have a context with a background or maybe a little character comes out and says, "Today, we're learning colors. My favorite color is yellow. What's yours?" It's a little bit more contextual. One is that it's contextual. The other one is that it's personalized in some way.
Ross: Is that just what you said about like, "My favorite color's yellow. What's your favorite color"? You are saying something that's meaningful to you, right?
Jake: Yeah.
Ross: Great. There's one more, right?
Jake: Her last one, Kathy Hirsh‑Pasek's last one of the pillars is social interaction. That is an opportunity for learners to interact with other learners.
The science of learning says that if you've learned something and you're interacting with other people, you are more likely to acquire that language or new topic, if you've learned it by interacting with someone than if you're learning it on your own.
Ross: My understanding is a lot of games now have this kind of interaction where people are online. I remember when I was at university, it would just be me and my friends in our living room playing games together. Now, you can be playing with people all over the world. Is that happening in language learning apps?
Jake: This is one of the most fascinating points. The thing on the tip of everyone's tongue at the moment is, "Why aren't they doing this?" The gaming industry has been revolutionized by the fact that people can sit, talk to each other across the world using headset, and no one has integrated this into their apps very well yet.
It seems like a massive missing link. It's exactly the same device, yet we don't do it. Number one reason is child protection. Everyone is so worried about the laws on child protection at the moment. To me, I find that the safety then inhibits the learning.
Ross: You also looked at four apps and basically how often or how well did these four apps do these things of minds on learning engagement, being meaningful of having social interaction?
Jake: Yes, I did. The four apps that focused on language learning for children aged between the ages of three to six or three to eight. They were all apps focusing on Cambridge starters or the foundation level of English. They were all apps that were focused towards fun game‑based learning.
The difference between the four apps though is three of them were produced for consumers, one was produced if you are part of a big language learning organization. I tried to find the best examples of language learning apps.
Ross: Great. What did you find? How well are these apps doing these different things that in theory they should be doing?
Jake: For active learning, I found that there was a high frequency of opportunities across all the apps for the learners to be able to be engaged in the learning in a very active way. An example of a game might be a shop scene, and the customer in the shop says, "I want two apples, please."
There's lots of fruits going past the child. They have to look at the fruits, and choose the two apples, and then pass them to the customer with their fingers, but at least there's some sort of interaction. They had to look and remember what the words were and pick between two things.
App‑based learning is all about picking between A, B, C, or D, and then hand it over to that customer, and then the customer will say, "Thank you."
Ross: That's really interesting because that almost sounds like social interaction, doesn't it? Because I guess you're interacting with a bot or something, but it's a roleplay. It's doing the other role, right?
Jake: Yeah, exactly, Ross. That was a really good example of them trying to actually just put an actual interaction in there that you could do in real life. A lot of the other interactions are just things like, you got to move if you want to spell a word, but you got to go through a maze to find the letters to spell the word.
It might be silhouettes of an animal, and you got to try and think, "What is this silhouette, and it's covered up by something?" You got to try and work out what that animal was. There were lots of opportunities for active learning.
There were also some apps that relied on passive learning activities that might have been in the aim to fill up the amount of content, something like watching a video with no task. If it was watching a video and tap on all the red things, that would be interactive.
If it's just watching a video, there is a lot of evidence to show that that doesn't encourage much learning. Just putting a video in front of a child doesn't lead to learning.
Ross: I guess it's what you would do in a class, where if you were to play a listening, you wouldn't just say, [laughs] "Listen to this." You'd say, "How many people are speaking?" or, "What are they talking about?" or, "Here's four pictures. Where do you think they are?" There'd be some tasks associated with whatever you're listening to.
We've covered minds on learning engagement. Tell us about the apps being meaningful. How well were they able to do that?
Jake: They did OK. It was done in a few different ways. One is presenting a short 30‑second video to show the language in some sort of context. There'll be an activity directly after, or they might use a real teacher being filmed saying, "Hi, kids. Here's the colors," and then they watch that video, and they have to do an activity.
The other way is that within the game, it's set into a scene, and it works. Even though I said before, we should reduce distraction, but it might be for fruits. It might be that there are apples on the tree, oranges on the tree, and bananas on a different tree.
At least you're seeing that the fruit is on the tree. Although in a city, I don't know how much kids know that fruits come from the trees.
[laughter]
Jake: It might be like pick three apples, pick two bananas, at least you know that it's a fruit on a tree and you're picking it or daily routine. It might be brushing your teeth, but it's in a bathroom. It's like, "Pick up the toothbrush and brush his teeth. Good job." At least you're doing the actual activity with the thing.
Where they lack in the meaning is then relating it back to the kids' lives. None of the apps I looked at would then say, "Where do you brush your teeth at your house?" for example, or, "Show me where a banana from your house?"
Ross: Jake, as someone who's been involved in language learning for a long, long time, you did this project. You looked at these different apps. You looked at how well they match educational theory. As someone who's involved in apps but also just teaching and learning in general, what are the main takeaways?
Jake: Devices and tablets and language learning apps allow to develop independent learning more so than you would ever have in a class because the child's there with their own tablet, focusing in with their attention engaged in some sort of activity.
They can be getting data and feedback on how they're doing that. They can be doing that own at home alone. They can be taking that to use in class. That's the first one.
Number two is that as we start to integrate more data collection from how well they're learning, or what they're learning, this feedback loop that kids will be able to get into ‑‑ and including the parents in that as well ‑‑ we'll be able to be getting data on every single interaction the child is doing.
We'll have a lot, lot better understanding of how different children are learning and be able to create better environments for each child.
The last one is I believe all edtech developers need to be focused on child safety and privacy but also understand that the number one thing we can do with all of these apps is connect kids all around the world to talk to each other.
Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Jake Whiddon. For more from Jake, check out the link in the show notes. Also in the show notes, you'll find a link to our YouTube channel, which you should subscribe to and if you'd like to support the podcast to buy us a coffee. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.